The Global Temperature and Salinity Profile Programme (GTSPP) is a cooperative international project that seeks to develop and maintain a global ocean Temperature-Salinity resource with up-to-date and high quality data.

Purpose

Making global measurements of ocean temperature and salinity (T-S) quickly and easily accessible to users is the primary goal of the GTSPP. Both real time data transmitted over the

Global Telecommunications System The Global Telecommunication System (GTS) is a secured communication network enabling real-time exchange of meteorological data from weather stations, satellites and numerical weather prediction centres, providing critical meteorological forecastin ...

(GTS), and delayed-mode data received by NCEI are acquired and incorporated into a continuously managed database.

International contributors

Several countries contribute to the GTSPP. They are: *

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

Canada's Marine Environmental Data Service (MEDS) leads the project, and has the operational responsibility to gather and process the real-time data. MEDS accumulates real-time data from several sources via the GTS. They check the data for several types of errors, and remove duplicate copies of the same observation before passing the data on to NCEI. The

quality control Quality control (QC) is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production. ISO 9000 defines quality control as "a part of quality management focused on fulfilling quality requirements". This approach places ...

procedures used in GTSPP were developed by MEDS, who also coordinated the publication of those procedures through the

Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO) was established by resolution 2.31 adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO. It first met in Paris at Unesco Headquarters from 19 to 27 October 1961. Initially, 40 States becam ...

(IOC).

NOAA The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (abbreviated as NOAA ) is an United States scientific and regulatory agency within the United States Department of Commerce that forecasts weather, monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditio ...

National Centers for Environmental Information The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), an agency of the United States government, manages one of the world's largest archives of atmospheric, coastal, geophysical, and oceanic data, containing information that ranges from th ...

(NCEI) performs four functions for the GTSPP: # Maintains the global database of temperature and salinity data and provides online access to the data. # Adds real-time data supplied by MEDS to the database. # Processes delayed mode copies of data by performing the same data quality tests as MEDS, then adds data to the database. # Prepares monthly data sets and transfers them by network to participants in the U.S., Australia and France, as well as to requestors. In addition to MEDS and NCEI, three science centers participate in the project by independently evaluating the delayed-mode data sets for the

Indian Indian or Indians may refer to: Peoples South Asia * Indian people, people of Indian nationality, or people who have an Indian ancestor ** Non-resident Indian, a citizen of India who has temporarily emigrated to another country * South Asia ...

Pacific The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

, and

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe ...

s. Australia's

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government agency responsible for scientific research. CSIRO works with leading organisations around the world. From its headquarters in Canberra, CSIRO ...

(CSIRO), the

Scripps Institution of Oceanography The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (sometimes referred to as SIO, Scripps Oceanography, or Scripps) in San Diego, California, US founded in 1903, is one of the oldest and largest centers for oceanography, ocean and Earth science research ...

(SIO), and

Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), a federal research laboratory, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), located in Miami in the Unite ...

(AOML) perform this function as

Data Assembly Center In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted. ...

s for the

World Ocean Circulation Program In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...

, which the GTSPP supports.

Infrastructure

The GTSPP consists of four major components: * Global Telecommunication System (GTS): Carries real-time data from ships and buoys in support of the IOC/WMO Integrated Global Ocean Services System (IGOSS). * IODE Data Centers: Contribute data, monitor the project, and distribute products. These are national oceanographic data centers which participate in the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) System of the International Oceanographic Commission. * Continuously Managed Database (CMD): Maintains the up-to-date global temperature-salinity data, replaces near real-time records with higher quality delayed-mode records as they are received, and disseminates the data to users. * WOCE Data Assembly Centers: Perform scientific quality control through data analysis, and issues products and predictions based on the global temperature-salinity data set.

GTSPP documents

GTSPP Real-time Quality Control Manual (IOC Manuals and Guides #22)

External links

Global Temperature and Salinity Profile Programme (GTSPP)

* ttp://www.nodc.noaa.gov/GTSPP/access_data/gtspp-bc.html Public access to best-copy data from the GTSPP Continuously Managed Database
Emphasis of Temperature-Salinity on environment
{{physical oceanography National Oceanographic Data Center